alias Bruce.

The chaos now surrounding the American "deal" to release dissident Chen Guangcheng to the Chinese government

is a surprise only to the willingly blind. The accounts in today's NYT, including this one and this one, help to show why. This latest from CNN, though, also shows that Chen refuses to go quietly, and he is determined to put Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the American government on the spot just when they thought they had sidestepped this inconvenient problem.

It is clear that the U.S. wanted to squirm out of the Chen situation as quickly as possible so as to protect its shaky relationship with its creditor and cheap-labor-supplier China. In America's China policy, human rights rank well below the needs of the corporate and financial players who underwrite and steer our foreign policy. We all know this, although polite corporate media will not explicitly say it. Moreover, this has been true for many years, despite current Republican rants about the Obama administration's cowardly rush for an excuse to ditch dissident Chen. You can bet that a Republican administration would have been equally or more eager to find a quick way to dump Chen in the interest of business and finance, since both the Dems and the G.O.P work for the same employers.

Only an American policy team desperate to avoid a business-unfriendly fight would have believed (or pretended to believe) China's lame assurances that Chen and his family would not suffer further retaliation after his release back into Chinese hands. Chen himself seems to have panicked into accepting the deal, and now that reality is setting in he is, rightly, afraid and angry. Yes, he reportedly went along with it at first. But his current claim that Americans pressured him and failed to tell him all the facts appears to have some veracity. And in any case, when a panicked, injured, persecuted dissident shows up at an American embassy after a car chase, cooler heads have an obligation to assess the situation in the interest of justice.

To give you an idea of just how bad things had gotten for Chen by the time he reached the U.S. embassy, here is a short excerpt from one of the NYT pieces:

Although there were no legal charges pending against the couple, local officials had decided to turn their home into a makeshift prison with high walls, well-paid guards and sheets of metal to cover their windows.  The local government’s goal was twofold: to prevent Mr. Chen from engaging in his legal work against coercive family-planning policies and to keep the couple cut off from the outside world. When the Chens broke the rules — by trying to sneak out messages or secretly detailing their mistreatment in a homemade video — they were viciously beaten.

For the U.S. to then turn around and concoct a flimsy deal to drop Chen like a hot potato is, tragically, business as usual. In the aftermath of the dirty deal, we see handily-choreographed stances on both sides: China demands an American apology for its temporary sheltering of Chen. And the U.S. grandly refuses to say it is sorry. Everybody gets to protect their own flank. Except Chen, that is, whose ability to generate international outrage and pressure may determine his fate.

Meanwhile, the bloody economic gears keep turning.

The fatal flaw in the Obama health care mandate is not its constitutionality.

Sure, one can argue that it is constitutional on the grounds that mandated health insurance, similarly to mandated car insurance, is necessary to avoid unfair distribution of the cost of illness. Or one can argue that the health mandate is unconstitutional in placing an undue burden on people to buy something, since one can choose not to drive but no one will be exempt from the health law.

But constitutionality is not the real problem.

The real problem is that the Obama health mandate forces people to buy from a completely unworkable private health care system – in a purported attempt to spare people the unworkability of the very same private health care system. It's absurd, of course. But that is how a corporate-financed electoral system works: only ideas considered tolerable by the corporate sector stay on the table. That is why Obama, after arguing eloquently for a public option during his presidential campaign, dropped it and fled the issue after taking office when he met resistance from his sponsors (and from the even more shameless corporate shills across the aisle).

And so our president, under the watchful eye of the health care industry, offers his version of health care reform: force Americans to buy it from the very mechanism that broke it. This at a time when so much of the industrialized world has evolved to the basic realization that public health care is the most economically logical and humanly fair approach.

Yes, there is good in the Affordable Care Act. Expanding eligibility for coverage is good. Forbidding the savage denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions is good.

But the entire Act is built upon a flagrant lie: the assumption that the American corporate health insurance system can deliver care affordably and efficiently to all Americans. This is a fantasy that only corporate-financed politicians – and some gullible citizens seduced by the hallucination of mega-corporate market "freedom" – can believe. It has forced Obama into a box where he is staking his claim of full access to health care on the pointless premise of forcing people to buy health coverage in a rapacious private-ruled market. And, ironically, even this laughable version of "reform" may very well be trashed by a Supreme Court that sometimes seems nostalgic for Dickensian capitalism.

So the grand question that the top court in the land will now decide for us is: Shall we remain free to suffer without health insurance, or shall we be required by law to suffer the cruel price of purchasing it from our masters?

So let's say you were super-rich

and you and your buddies controlled the money that controls the American electoral system.

And let's say you needed a way in 2012 to keep voters away from dangerous ideas like nationalizing health care and reining in routine clandestine government snooping on citizens.

What would you do?

One really effective way would be to enable a procession of radical rightie presidential challengers, including a bona-fide religious fascist who wants to criminalize contraception, to shift the entire campaign debate so far to the right that the incumbent president – a guy who supports assassination of U.S. citizens and who has used the Espionage Act to punish government whistleblowers more than all other presidents combined – can pose himself as a centrist.

Pretty nifty. If you wanted to guarantee that whoever is elected in 2012 would be much friendlier to a corporate security state than the wishes voters express in polls, this scheme would be a brilliant way to accomplish that.

Just saying.

The irony of Newt Gingrich and the Democrats

is that the Dems still don't understand Newt's crystal-clear, in-your-face tutorial about the raw force of audacity.

Gingrich is surely doing his best to teach them. What better lesson could there be than the example of a hamster-faced, philandering, hypocritical ingrate soaring to top-level contention on the mere strength of defiant, eloquent passion?

As I've said before, a core truth of populist electoral power is that voters like a candidate who is unafraid to lose.

A savvy and principled rival candidate's takeaway from The Newt Tutorial would be: "Wow. If a repulsive liar blowing smoke for the most unpopular schemes of the rich can make that ruse work via pure rhetorical fury, imagine what a fearlessly passionate advocate for truly popular causes like expanding health care and reining in corporations could do."

But the Dems, terrified of the class consequences of true populism and schooled in the Democratic Leadership Conference legacy of business-driven lip-synch messaging, are not teachable on the subject of real mass appeal. And so President Irrelevant continues to go robotic on the campaign trail, mouthing tepid generalities and sleepy slogans such as "change will come." And his party remains allergic to the kinds of messages that could electrify voters.

All of this is for a very logical reason: Dems in the service of Wall Street do not want to electrify voters with compelling arguments that undercut the fiscal sponsors of the Dems' political campaigns. Democrats are betting, instead, that they can win in 2012 with lukewarm ad-slogan versions of voter grievances that, like most successful advertising campaigns, imply just enough to make the sale while delivering nothing.

Still, it's an interesting irony: The corporate candidate whose positions are furthest from the public interest makes the most of populist emotion. And the corporate candidate who could come closer to voters' actual passion makes the least of it.

I'm making changes

to this blog.

You may have noticed it's been more than two months since I last posted. I'm just not into continually opinionizing right now. There is an entire online culture that opinionizes in the continual present tense: "Here is what I think about what just happened in (insert political entity here)." I don't see it doing us much good. Certain things are true, and they will remain true until we act to change them, and until we do, opinionizing once a week about the same truths is like shouting at each other weekly that the sky is blue.

Truth: The United States is a corporate monarchy in which the state has been purchased in service of monopoly capitalists.

Truth: Elections will remain a sham as long as private money is allowed to dominate them.

Truth: Privilege and continued combat among we non-plutocrats -- by race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, physical ability and other distinctions -- is the best divisive tactic the ruling class has at its disposal. If not for this, we'd have stormed the Bastille long ago.

We know these things. What we need to do is change them. There is more than enough repetitive stating of the obvious already. That's one reason I'm changing the blog.

Another reason is that my life has grown. I'm a working musician, a perfoming poet, an author working on my next book, and a person like you who walks around seeing and hearing stuff I sometimes want to share because it helps me become more aware of life, period.

So you'll see a lot more here than you've seen before. Sure, it will include political opinions, but it will also go further.

I can't tell you yet where this will go. But in the coming weeks you and I will both start to find out.

All you need to know about journalists who have no vision

is in this Washington Post (print version) headline about Mitt Romney and Rick Perry:

Two GOP rivals are worlds apart

The Post story tells how Romney and Perry are "two men just three years apart in age, but who otherwise are about as different as possible." It is chock-full of family anecdotes and personality clashes and styles of politics: Perry's childhood home without indoor plumbing, Romney's cushy tutelage in his dad's car factory, Perry's preacherly redneck appeal (those aren't the Post's words but that is their meaning), Romney's staid Harvard-trained policy prescriptions. And so on.

To which I say, So what? These are two men competing to shamelessly favor the rich, to demonize government, to slash corporate and millionaire taxes, to cripple environmental regulation, and to act as if they care about ordinary people while sneaking in policies that will leave their bamboozled grassroots supporters poorer and sicker. To anyone who can see even a few inches beyond the corporate script of what America ought to look like, Romney and Perry are together on every issue that matters to the monied.

But in the tiny world of Post reporter Philip Rucker, the two men couldn't possibly be more different. After all, when you take the corporate-dominated model of American governance for granted, as Rucker and most journalists here do, what distinctions are left to talk about? Perry shouts and Romney lectures! Perry sweats and Romney chills! Perry is for a passionately demagogic form of corporate dominance and Romney is for a quieter, calmer form of corporate dominance! Wow, what differences! The two men are galaxies apart!

This is what happens -- and this is true of any regime in the world -- when those anointed as officially-recognized reporters of the state of the nation cannot see beyond the assumptions underlying that current state. Post reporter Rucker, I'll wager, cannot even conceive of an America where corporations would have no more power than ordinary citizens, where money would be forcibly removed from politics, and where the nation's very power structure itself could be overthrown via public uprising and replaced with (gasp) another. These kinds of seismic changes happen all the time in the world. And they will, ultimately, happen here. But such a possibility is not even on Rucker's map. It is not in the realm of his wildest imaginings.

And so the purported contest is Cola versus Ginger Ale: they're so different from each other! So unpredictable in their appeal! Dark and sultry versus golden and spicy!

What gets lost in this script is that both are full of refined sugar, carbonated, artificially flavored and colored, and bad for every part of you from your teeth to your colon. What gets lost is that there is a world full of other things to drink, any number of which could and perhaps should become the newly dominant national beverages.

In my previous post, I (rightly I believe) praised a recent Post story about how both Democrats and Republicans have consistently favored the rich with capital gains tax cuts. But we need to remember that on any given day most corporate journalists are not the questioners of the corporate state. They are its stenographers.

A must-read WaPo story details how both Democrats and Republicans have steadily favored the rich by cutting capital gains taxes,

which in effect creates a higher tax rate for middle-income Americans than for the wealthy.

As the Washington Post story explains, by defining investment income as "capital gains" and taxing it at a substantially lower rate than wages and salaries, corporate-fed politicians have created two tiers of taxpayers: those who earn vast amounts on their investment holdings but are more lightly taxed, and those who earn modest incomes by working and are more heavily taxed. Fair? Only in a Washington where policy is purchased via campaign cash and high-priced lobbying -- and where most senators are millionaires.

The mercilessly detailed Post story -- one column on the front page and six columns on the jump -- runs the numbers, names the political shills on both sides of the aisle, and, in places, provides the kind of brutally straight talk about class conflict we rarely see in corporate media. An excerpt:

While it’s true that many middle-class Americans own stocks or bonds, they tend to stash them in tax-sheltered retirement accounts, where the capital gains rate does not apply. By contrast, the richest Americans reap huge benefits. Over the past 20 years, more than 80 percent of the capital gains income realized in the United States has gone to 5 percent of the people; about half of all the capital gains have gone to the wealthiest 0.1 percent.

“The way you get rich in this world is not by working hard,” said Marty Sullivan, an economist and a contributing editor to Tax Analysts. “It’s by owning large amounts of assets and having those things appreciate in value.”

I lambast corporate media heavily and often, because few things hurt a society more than journalists who lack the conviction to be reporters instead of typists. But I give credit where credit is due: to reporters Steven Mufson and Jia Lynn Yang. who wrote the Post story.

Read it. You'll not see many like it.

 

 

I didn't support Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential bid

because I didn't trust her. She struck me as cynical, opportunistic, and a pale (no pun intended) second to Barack Obama's apparent passion on issues such as health care and taxing the rich. Of the two flavors of corporate-backed Democratic candidates made available by our money-filtered system, Obama, with his ability to inspire popular political momentum, appeared to me to have much more potential for at least doing some good for we non-rich Americans after the rapacious Bush years. I still believe he had (and has) that potential, but I no longer believe he has the character to rise to it.

You can see where I'm going with this. I don't know that Hillary Clinton would have been any better in the oval office than Obama. But with what we now know about Obama's spinelessness, she certainly couldn't have been any worse. And I think there is a very good chance that her fighting spirit alone would have produced a different political outcome in the Public Option and debt ceiling debates. Say what you like about her calculated political-machine expediency -- and I have! -- it is hard for me to see President Hillary Clinton meekly submitting to the past three years of pistol-whipping Republican extortion as the G.O.P. has held the nation hostage to the crazed priorities of its fascist wing. Sure, hindsight is 20/20. But if there is a Democrat with the steely constitution to spit in the eye of the vilely arrogant John Boehner and to slap down the rabid Michele Bachmann, it is Hillary Clinton.

So: now that we have witnessed the spectacular collapse of Obama, it is time for me and others who cautiously backed Obama to admit that we were suckered by his charisma -- and to ask if we blew it with Hillary. Me, I'm ready to say that if I had it to do over again I'd have chosen Clinton in 2008 -- on the basis that a corporate shill who is willing to rear up and fight when cornered is a better choice than a corporate shill who melts into "bipartisan" pudding. Fact is, when Hillary warned us that this guy was in over his head, she was right.

There is more and more "what about Hillary in 2012" talk these days among left and center-left folks as we head toward the nomination. The murmuring has moved from private conversations -- which I have been having with colleagues and friends for months -- into the public arena, as in a recent "Hillary Told You So" piece by Leslie Bennetts at The Daily Beast. One scenario is that Obama, who is showing signs of fatigue, would opt not to run, freeing himself to kick some ass as a lame duck and freeing Clinton to pursue and gain the nomination. Of course, perhaps poor Obama is incapable of kicking ass under any circumstances (see my immediately preceding post).

But having Obama out of the race could at least be a help.

Thanks to Laurie.

The best explanation of America's political dysfunctionality that I've seen in a long time

is this piece by Numerian at The Agonist. Want to know why Congress and the Senate are both powerless and unmotivated to create legislation that serves the public interest? It's all here.

As the anti-union screw turns, let's step back and look

at how we got to where we are in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana:

– First, private sector recklessness, and private-driven laxness in public oversight, tank the national economy.

– Next, privately-funded politicians who enabled the tanking of the economy gain election by loudly blaming "overactive" government for the crisis.

– Meanwhile, states go financially belly-up in the tanked economy.

– Finally, privately-funded politicians, now running states that their policies bankrupted, find a scapegoat for their empty coffers: public employees.

If we weren't seeing it, you would never believe it. Yet here we are in a hall of twisted mirrors, where a charlatan and hack like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker can, with a straight face, go easy on the folks who actually have the money (his sponsors) while bulldozing one of the last remaining shelters for those who don't, namely public employee unions.

You know the rest of the story: Democratic legislators fleeing to a neighboring state; angry crowds massing; Governor Hack bleating daily about those Omnipowerful Fat Cat Public Workers; his big-money sponsors busing in throngs of cooperative anti-union stooges; unions yielding to virtually all of the governor's fiscal demands while wide-eyed reporters call it a two-way "standoff" because workers won't agree to being stripped naked and whipped. The latest in Wisconsin is that Republican legislators are moving to fine AWOL Dems $100 a day and take away their parking spaces and spending accounts after already having commandeered their paychecks. My source in the Wisconsin capital now tells me that, after a period of unity among runaway Dems, a rift has opened between those who want to stick it out to the bitter end and those who want to return home. Less dramatic versions of the public-employees-as-budget-breakers script are playing out in Ohio and Indiana.

Governor Walker may win or lose his war to strip Wisconsin's state workers of the bulk of their collective bargaining rights. Either way, he may or may not politically survive his victory or his loss. Resulting scrutiny of deals buried in Walker's budget by his major sponsor, Koch Industries – and a national boycott of Koch products – may alter the trajectory of Walker's administration regardless of what happens with the unions.

But one thing is for certain: Whatever "success" the rich and their political employees enjoy via these union-demonizing diversions will be short-term. Yes, some wealthy folks and their companies and major stockholders will sock away more loot and dodge more taxes for a while. And some governors, senators and congresspersons will enjoy a few years of power as the reward for their complicity. But you cannot keep picking fruit off a tree while starving its roots. Sooner or later, the sustaining force of the economy – ordinary people's jobs and spending power – has to be sustained itself. The path out of the Great Recession (notice how its official name is creeping closer and closer to that of the previous epochal economic collapse?) is ultimately unavoidable: More regulation of private sector behavior, more progressive taxation, and more public sector investment in jobs and infrastructure.

There are no shortcuts. And the liars and scoundrels who peddle them – the Scott Walkers of today – will be remembered as the George W. Bushes of tomorrow: with well-deserved derision and contempt.